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yesterday I read several comments to a question similar to this one and thought that it would just be fun to see what all of you come up with....
payphones ect
I thought of one that wasn't listed sometimes money was short and we would go get groceries knowing that there wasn't enough money and hoping that we would get money into the bank before the check made it... now even if they used a check it's all electronic and the check is either cleared or not...
I am sure we can come up with lots of things that was a given and now not... one was having to roll down each of the car windows individually
lets have a bit of fun
sheila

One thing I know my grandchildren never experienced was the freedom I had as a child to go places and explore the neighborhood. I can remember riding our bikes 6-7 miles to a mall along the shoulder of a paved road, or riding to a cider mill on dirt or the shoulder of paved roads. As long as we went in pairs or threes, and stuck together, our parents figured we were safe.

I was sent on the train from Detroit to Chicago as a companion to my cousin when I was 12 and she was 11. We went to visit her aunt for a couple of weeks. Again, she would not have been allowed to go alone, but in pairs was fine. I think that freedom gave us some confidence that today's kids don't get. (I watched a parent drive a boy three blocks to visit with one grandson in a gated and patrolled neighborhood, which I thought was ridiculous since they were both about 12-13.

And the excuse for keeping such a tight lease should not be that crime is worse nowadays, because all the date says that crime is less, not more prevalent.

I thought I posted on this last night. I was in bed and probably decided to sleep instead lol

I clearly remember milk being delivered to the door and the man coming around with his cart to sharpen knives.

So many other things as both of you, Sheila and Judy, have mentioned just a few, too.

I still miss the Good Humor ice cream truck

I think one that was mentioned is map reading.... with smartphones and maps on line I'm sure that they will never learn how to do that... oh and long distance phone calls I remember calling my mom one day I was living in SLC had meet someone at church and she had seen what my maiden name was and wondered if I knew so and so I said probably related my family and that family were related through marriage so I asked mom who so and so was and she goes to check her family records and I'm sitting there worried about how much that call was going to cost me.... a lot for sure turns out my friends grandmother was my grandfather's sister
so much that we did that they will never have the opportunity to experience so good and some bad
sheila

Did your milkman hand out free chunks of ice? I remember ours did. Also stuck the milk into the milk chute next to the side door of our house.

Also, along with the milk man (who walked in and put the milk in the refrigerator if you weren't home), we also had a bread man and the ice man and a produce truck that came around once a week. There is such an uproar over jobs being lost when automation or progress comes along, but those delivery jobs were lost along with elevator operators, public restroom attendants, door to door vacuum cleaner salesmen, on and on. Whole factories and industries had to go, which put a lot of folks out of work. My first job out of high school was testing Royal typewriters. What about the telephone industry? All those phone operators, manufacturers, etc. Anyone still have an encyclopedia? Remember when kids stood up in the front seat of the car? Rode in the back of a pickup? Or played and slept in the back of a station wagon? All without seatbelts. Remember garter belts? Sleeping on curlers? We could go on forever remembering our generation's "good old days" just like those who came before us had their own "good old days". But my grandmother used to be in wonder at all that happened just in her lifetime. She marveled that she lived to travel in a horse and buggy and see a man on the moon!

Ok - what do you remember or miss?

Evie

Evie, I think my head has permanent ridges from the rollers. lol My hair has a little natural curl and I wanted it straight so I used the biggest rollers I could find.

Martha

Watching TV on the only black and white TV in the house, without a remote.

Irmi wrote:Watching TV on the only black and white TV in the house, without a remote.

I think we only had three channels and they went off the air around midnight with a local minister giving a prayer. I didn't realize they were local until when I was in college a minister taught a class I took in college and one night he was doing the prayer.

In the Detroit area, we had FOUR channels--NBC, ABC, CBS, and CBC which was Canadian TV. On Sundays, we used to get pro wrestling from Windsor, ice hockey, curling, and old WWII movies. Many, many years later, I found out that a woman I worked with was a female wrestler way back in the 50s and 60s. She was in her late 50s when I knew her, a typical grandmotherly type, and she said her TV name was Mad Marie!!

Do any of you remember the old Victory at Sea programs on Sunday afternoons? They were mostly black and white, but the music was fantastic.

I think we had one maybe two stations and they did go off at midnight
Party lines are another thing even our kids didn't experience
I remember one time when talking with a friend we knew someone was listening to the conversation so we talked about a book without disclosing it was a book think it was Exodus not from the bible fun times
sheila

Judy - Victory at Sea was my husband's favorite program!

Think I already told you gals before that when I was about 12 my Grandmother had practically the only t.v. set in town. It was a 12" screen and the neighbors would come over to watch the one and only show that was broadcast each night. The night that showed wrestling was the most popular. There was only one channel available and it only broadcast a few hours a day, but everyone was so amazed about the technology that we didn't mind there wasn't a choice.

Evie

We had the first TV in the area, I remember my cousins and some of the neighbor kids coming over to watch Disney or some of the other shows. We had the country store and lived behind it. People would charge all their groceries and then pay the bill on the Friday when they got paid. People would come to the back door and ask if they could get milk or bread or whatever if we were closed. When my folks were having lunch or supper and someone was shopping, they would yell through the Dutch door, Mary Jane or Johnny, we are ready to check out! Sometimes my sister and I would deliver groceries on our bikes. We would ride our bikes to the local state park and spend the day swimming, hiking etc and go home at night. The park was about 4 miles from where we lived.
Of course we had a phone line with 2 other people, so you could pick up the phone and put it down when others were on it and have to wait to make your call. I tell my grandkids about some of it and they don't believe me at first!
It was a good time, with a lot of freedom and free from worry. A LOT different from what my grandkids are experiencing!

I think a key thing for a lot of us was this freedom, especially the freedom from parents knowing everything we did. So, what I do that my parents did not know about? First, we were forbidden to climb trees after my dumb five-year-old cousin fell out of one. (We blamed him forever.) So, after that, we only climbed trees when they had a lot of leaves on them so our parents could not see us--the woodsy area was behind a house across the street, so we were not doing this in our own yards. Second, we used to dig holes under the chain link and barbed wire fence around a big field nearby. It had been used as a training horse racetrack at one time, but kids used to start bonfires over there. Third, we picked strawberries in a field at the end of our street. Never told our parents about that because there was a big bull who lived in that field, so we had to watch out for him. Fourth, we ALWAYS went trick or treating in the dark by ourselves, never with a parents supervising us. It was great fun to be several blocks away, getting tons of candy.

Just found this article by Liza Mundy that I copied on 2003 from the Washington Post. It talks about how children have a life without parents:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/magazine/2003/05/11/the-cat-will-play/079b9b62-52fd-4731-a08d-d4c1dda9c2e8/